Smart Reporting provides powerful options which allow you to format report records depending on the presence of certain conditions. For example, you can highlight a record if a due date is past.

In this blog I will show how you can create a simple traffic light or red, amber, green (RAG) report, which will highlight incidents that are past SLA in red, those that are close to their SLA resolution date in orange and those with plenty of time left in green.

First create your report, in this example I have created a simple incident report.

I want to use a traffic light system to highlight incidents that are close to or past their Required Resolution Date.

Change the background cell colour based on resolution due date

Click on Conditional Formatting:

Select Required Resolution Date then set up three alerts, making sure that Dynamic Date is selected.

The rules are:

- If Required Resolution Date is Less than or equal to Current date - cell colour Red

- If Required Resolution Date is Between Current date + 1 and Current date + 4 - cell colour Orange

- If Required Resolution Date is Greater than or equal to Current date + 5 days - cell colour Green

Below are some screenshots of the results (Current date was 12 February 2019).

A common format in RAG reports is to use an icon. You can also achieve this through conditional formatting.

Create a traffic light icon field based on resolution due date

Add another column to your report. I have added another Required Resolution Date column/field and I have renamed it 'RAG'.

Under Conditional Formatting select Icon in the Style drop down menu.

The Icon Set menu will appear. Select Traffic Lights. Set up your alerts in a similar way as the screenshot below:

i.onbmc.com includes a useful tool to help you manage your RaaS change requests. The Change Calendar shows all scheduled changes by assigned group and change status as well as changes for the past 90-day period. The calendar shows both your changes (for example, code promotions) and BMC-initiated (for example, maintenance activities) changes.

Accessing the Change Calendar

Login to i.onbmc.com. Scroll down to Other services and click on Change calendarThe calendar can be viewed by:

Year

Month

Week

Day

List (a list view of changes)

The calendar can be filtered by Assigned Group and Change Status.

Assigned Group

DBA

Infosec

ITSM Applications

Change Status

Closed

Completed

Implementation in Progress

Scheduled for Approval

Viewing upcoming changes

The Year, Month, Week and Day tabs allow you to view upcoming changes over different time periods.

To view ALL upcoming changes select the List tab. Click the filter option All Events and tick Upcoming events. You can drill down further using the Assigned Group and Change Status filters. Selecting All events will include all past changes for the last 90 days.

Viewing completed or closed changes

To check whether a change has been completed simply filter by Change Status and Completed. For closed changes (not necessarily completed) tick the Closed option.

Searching for changes

To the right of the tabs is a search box. To find a specific change request enter the reference number in the search box. You can also search by keyword.

Viewing the details of a particular change

In the calendar view you can view the details of each change by clicking on the change request reference. This will show a pop-up box with more details including a link to view the full change request record.

In SmartIT inline styles can be used to apply css to tables and images. This can be useful when you need to tweak how an image or table appears in a specific article. For example, you might want to make an image stand out by adding shadow or highlight alternate rows in a table to add interest.

How to apply inline styles to images

Add an image by clicking the image icon.

Select the Advanced tab in the Image Properties dialog box.

If you have added width and height in Image Info the parameters will appear in the Style field. Simply add additional styles here, for example to add a shadow to an image enter

box-shadow: 10px 10px grey;

Useful image styles

Rounded image corners

Use border-radius. For example:

border-radius: 8px; - rounded corners

border-radius: 50px; - circled image

Responsive images

Responsive images will automatically adjust to fit the size of the screen.

"The largest cloud providers may be familiar names, but their offerings are changing and the cloud marketplace is rapidly evolving. Browse our list of cloud vendors to watch in 2019.

BMC(@BMCSoftware) offers a suite of management tools that provide monitoring, security, automation, and cost control for multi-cloud environments. Specifically, the Helix multi-cloud management platform should be of specific interest for businesses looking to gain advantage with multi-cloud architectures."

With BMC’s Digital Workplace and SmartIT becoming an integral part of many customers Helix Remedy Solution, it’s more important than ever that customers understand these product’s capabilities and the benefits that they can deliver to your business!

Below is a brief overview of each product.

Digital Workplace.

Digital Workplace (DWP) is a self-service application for business users to connect with IT, HR, etc. anywhere, anytime, on any device. Digital Workplace gives employees access to a consumer oriented experience, with one stop shopping for the technology tools they need to work effortlessly.

Digital Workplace is highly configurable. Features available to users in the client applications depend on which functionality is enabled and how Digital Workplace is configured.

Employees can use any supported mobile device or desktop browser for self-service, to enter trouble tickets, and to contact IT.

DWP with example configuration -

With Digital Workplace Advanced, employees can monitor the status of services and schedule appointments to meet with IT. When traveling, users can instantly find important information about their corporate campuses—from directions from the airport to floor maps of company office layouts that provide an easy way to find conference rooms, printers, and other assets in unfamiliar locations—anytime and anywhere. Employees can make requests specific to their personal assets and services. For example, they might request accessories for their laptop. With Digital Workplace Catalogue, service catalogue administrators can design services that are fulfilled by external systems. Services previously made available to employees in separate catalogues can be unified in a single service catalogue.

The Digital Workplace client applications can assist users throughout their day. The client applications show meeting schedules, required services, outstanding requests, and ongoing discussions about the people, places, and resources that the users choose to follow. The social media-like interface helps users to find location maps, reserve meeting rooms, install software, upgrade equipment, and book appointments. Employees can now have an easy way to interact with the corporate IT department from their mobile devices or a browser.

Remedy with Smart IT (Smart IT) is the next-generation BMC Remedy IT Service Management user experience. Basic BMC Remedy ITSM processes—creating tickets, viewing related items such as tickets, assets, or knowledge articles, and updating profile information—are now easier and quicker. The Smart IT user interface reduces the steps involved in performing these tasks. It provides an intuitive, social, and mobile service desk experience that enables a more knowledgeable and collaborative workforce organized around IT roles, not modules.

Digital transformation is a phrase that you may have heard numerous times over the past year and perhaps it has sparked your interest. Do you find yourself asking, “What does this really mean?” If terms like “Monolithic Architecture”, “Microservices” and “Containerization” have your head spinning – don’t worry, you are not alone. Let’s break these concepts down one by one and talk about what they mean for you as a BMC Helix Customer.

Here’s the skinny for you techies:

When you think about Monolithic Architecture, think about a traditional “enterprise application” - you have a database, an application running on a server somewhere, and a client-side user interface (often accessed via a browser). It is a monolith – one large, single pillar or executable. To add functionality to your application, an updated version of the entire application must be deployed on the server. In today’s DevOps world, you can compare this to Stonehenge.

Now enter stage left - Microservices and Containers…

Microservices are easy to explain. They are essentially a subcomponent of that “enterprise application” - think Smart IT, RSSO, Smart Reporting, etc. Containers (a little more complicated), wrap these microservices. You may have heard that Containers are the next evolution of Virtual Machines (VM’s), but the truth is they can (and often do) coexist. Containers decouple the application from the OS and are platform independent. They package independent components of an “enterprise application” and are designed to be lightweight, consuming the OS of their host. They can run anywhere! Multiple containers can be deployed in a single VM, but they can also be deployed directly on the underlying infrastructure.

Now that we have the more technical details out of the way, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

Containers are agile; they can quickly be deployed. As new functionality becomes available, these innovations can be deployed to your business users rapidly. You can easily adopt new releases and no longer need to set aside valuable resource time for an extended upgrade project.

Containers scale to fit your needs. With the help of tools like Kubernetes, if you need more resources (or less), we can quickly add (or remove) them with no impact to your business.

Containers can be deployed in our BMC Cloud or in public clouds (such as AWS or AZURE) enabling us to offer our service in the cloud of your choice, helping you align your enterprise solutions with your corporate cloud strategy.

Here is the bottom line: MORE agility, MORE scalability and MORE flexibility for what matters most to your business. Sounds pretty transformative to me!

If you’d like more information regarding any of these terms we’ve covered here or what BMC Helix means to you, please reach out your Business Relationship Manager.

BMC Helix is BMC’s new brand end-to-end, multi-cloud SaaS offering that reinvents traditional ITSM by integrating cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, by helping companies address the challenge of ITSM in a multi-cloud environment, and by giving customers a new choice to decide in which Cloud the ITSM service is offered.

With BMC Helix, customers can transform every layer of service delivery for end users, agents, and developers, evolving their ITSM service management from reactive to proactive and predictive with the highest level of accuracy and speed.

BMC Helix Chatbot, integrated with BMC Helix Business Workflows and BMC Helix Digital Workplace, driving an omni-channel experience for end users with support not just for Web, but also for Slackbot, Chatbot, SMS, and Skype.

BMC Helix Cognitive Automation, integrated with BMC Helix Remedy, BMC Helix Innovation Suite, and BMC Helix Business Workflows, allowing solutions to use a Machine Learning service to automatically classify unstructured data within the solutions, helping companies e.g. with auto-categorization of tickets or auto-selection of case templates when creating cases from incoming email.

With the delivery as SaaS model, BMC helps enterprises to effectively run their ITSM solution by reducing time and effort of upgrades, driving operational efficiencies, and scaling elastically.

At the core of BMC Helix are three key attributes, which reflect BMC’s focus and uniqueness:

Cloud to Multi-Cloud: BMC Helix delivers all capabilities as-a-service, helping customers to easily consume and stay current with their ITSM capabilities. On top of that, BMC enables efficient ITSM processes in a multi-cloud, multi-provider IT landscape.

Containers: BMC Helix is a SaaS offering provided in customers’ choice of cloud, including AWS and BMC Cloud. Containers enable BMC to deliver this choice of cloud.